Tag Archives: Twitter

Get social, make profit.

Econsultancy recently covered an announcement by Dutch airline KLM that they generate 25 million euros per year off of their social media activity. This is a very significant amount of money to be made off of social media efforts. Although social media is very clearly an extraordinarily popular means of communicating with clients and potential customers, experts and the like are still measuring how exactly to determine ROI off of social media and social media marketing companies are still struggling to actually make money.

Still, a quick perusal of KLM’s social media and it’s not overly surprising that they’re finding ways to make money off of it. Take Twitter for example: browse their tweets and you’ll see numerous promotions, videos, and photos for people to interact with. Browse through their tweets and replies and you’ll see a plethora of responses. The company is consistently responding to people who inquire, even negatively, and in 11 languages.

Even more impressive, their Twitter profile cover photo is updated every 5 minutes and features the estimated response time. It’s like being at the DMV, except it doesn’t suck and they can only respond in 140 character or less.

KLM updates their Twitter photo every 5 minutes to update followers. Source: Econsultancy.

The company states that it learned how to effectively use its social media during times of trouble:

“Recounting the story of KLM’s social origins, Vogel-Meijer said that in 2010 the company learned a lesson by responding quickly when flights over Europe were banned due to the Icelandic ash cloud.

Previously the company had only been using social to push out standard marketing messages, however thousands of questions began pouring in on Facebook and Twitter as all other service channels were busy.

Faced with the dilemma of either responding to the queries or ignoring them all, KLM opted for the former.

It did so without waiting to form a proper strategy, but responded to the situation as it developed.

That was the start KLM’s social strategy and remains the basis of its success.”

Put simply, KLM sees success in its social media because it follows some of the most basic principles of social media that many companies consistently fail to follow:

It doesn’t just advertise. Amongst advertisements are valuable promotions and cool content previously curated.
They respond and engage. If you tweet KLM, they will tweet you back. Plus, they adapt to the person speaking to them and they sound human.
They monitor their social channels. They soon began to find that many of their customers and social followers wanted forms of “social payments.” Now, you can pay online over Facebook and Twitter. And they claim to be making 80,000 euros a week doing it.

I guess it goes to show that if you properly engage your audience and make your company accessible and human online, profits can follow – especially if customers specifically ask to be able to pay over your social media channels, like KLM customers did.

Mobile commerce rapidly growing

By Q2 2013, experts were estimating that 25% of online sales transactions would occur on a mobile device by 2017. Reports show that by Q2 2014, a full year following this estimate, mobile commerce traffic had already increased by 125%. Important to note is that this is the first time that mobile commerce has overtaken tablet commerce in the online sales transaction market. This is pretty big. Customers may very well be on the way to becoming more comfortable with making a quick purchase off of their iPhone or Android, rather than having the desire to fully browse on a more interactive and larger tablet or desktop platform or, of course, by actually touching an item in a traditional brick-and-mortar store.

Mobile commerce is on the rise. Image from fastcompany.net.

The rise in mobile commerce is not without some issues of course. As the Econsultancy article outlines, “a mobile customer’s visit to an ecommerce website has a 50% higher bounce rate, a 30% lower add-to-cart rate, and is 10% more likely to abandon cart.”

Mobile developers and advertisers are working to combat these rates, however. Just recently, AdWords announced an upgrade to their mobile ads. For example, as discussed on Marketing Pilgrim, AdWords’ new Mobile Lightbox Engagement Ads, generated ads will now dynamically resize to fit the screen. Mobile ads will start to do what we have seen on desktop platforms for a couple of years now: advertisements will start small before expanding into visually appealing, dynamic advertisements. Some consumers may be annoyed, of course, but these mobile advertisements will no longer go unnoticed nor will they no longer be improperly optimized for our mobile devices.

Combined with this and many retailers’ efforts to make sure their own online stores are mobile optimized, we can’t forget that social media giant Twitter is experimenting with their own “Buy Now” button. While no results are available yet, Burberry tested out the button on sponsored tweets that were available to select U.S. Twitter users during London Fashion Week. If this feature rolls out mainstream, the ability to buy things on your iPhone will become extraordinarily easy and potentially risky for impulse buyers — but this could be a huge aid to reaching that 25% by 2017 estimate that experts made last year.

E-commerce is growing at a quick rate. If retailers and developers can create e-commerce platforms for mobile devices that are attractive, optimized, easy-to-use, and secure for consumers, mobile commerce poses a huge opportunity for businesses and marketers to boost sales.

Sound Off: Are you comfortable online shopping off of your mobile phone? What sort of features/elements do you look for while mobile shopping?

Lady Gaga vs. Target

I never planned for my first blog post to reference Lady Gaga. However, with the recent focus on Target’s various ad campaigns in lecture, I recalled the tension between the large retailer and the ultra-famous pop star. A deal had been inked between Lady Gaga and Target to release an “exclusive to Target” deluxe edition of her Born This Way album. However, Lady Gaga and her representatives moved quickly to dissolve the deal when it was discovered that the company’s political action committee (PAC) had made donations to Minnesota State Representative Tom Emmer’s campaign for governor, who is a staunch anti-LGBT activist and, according to some sources, has been associated with a ministry that advocates the killing of gay people.

Even further, Target’s PAC has reportedly donated over $30,000 to politicians who are openly and vehemently anti-gay rights activists — a message that runs directly against Lady Gaga’s overarching philosophies and even the direct motto in the title track “Born This Way.”

Besides simply a bout of bad press, it is important to question how this failed exclusivity deal between the retailer and the pop star links to marketing. I don’t think it is much of a stretch to say that much of the internal workings of a corporation as large as Target goes unnoticed, except to highly attentive shareholders. But the micro (internal) environment of a corporation can have a large effect on its marketing abilities in an instance such as this — although there may be a significant portion of Target’s clientele that agrees with their political donations, there is also a significant portion that doesn’t. This internal action by Target’s PAC lost them an exclusivity deal with one of the biggest pop star’s in the world (an individual who boasts an alarmingly loyal fanbase of “Little Monsters” and has over 33 million followers on Twitter). Arguably, these political donations created an external threat to its marketing: an extremely influential pop star has publicly denounced their brand name and refused to sell her products in their store, directly affecting which consumers can buy certain products.

This brings about a few questions: is it worth it for large corporations to run political PAC’s if they have the potential to be controversial? Is it acceptable for a company like Target to openly support political candidates who openly oppose the equality of individuals?